1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a voice control of a vacuum cleaner and, more particularly, to a voice control apparatus and method of a vacuum cleaner that are capable of effectively controlling a vacuum cleaner through a voice command from ambience.
2. Description of the Background Art
In general, a vacuum cleaner makes the inside of a main body to a high vacuum state by forcibly circulating air inside a mechanism according to a rotation of a motor. Accordingly, the vacuum cleaner sucks dust or contaminant together with air through a suction hole by using a strong air volume generated owing to high pressure difference between the ambience and the inside of the main body, thereby performing cleaning.
A general vacuum cleaner includes: a suction hole for sucking dust or contaminant, a motor, a rotating blade for making the inside of the device to a vacuum state, a filter for filtering dust or contaminant, dust collecting case and an exhaust hole for discharge sucked air.
The operation of the vacuum cleaner constructed as described above in accordance with the conventional art will now be explained.
In the vacuum cleaner, the blade connected to the internal motor is quickly rotated to vacuumize the inside of the cleaner and dust or contaminant is sucked through the suction hole together with air. At this time, the dust sucked through the suction hole is filtered by the filter and the sucked air is discharged to the exhaust hole, thereby performing a cleaning.
Recently, besides the vacuum cleaning, a cleaner that can perform a damp cloth cleaning is also fabricated, and is advancing to have a variety of functions.
For example the vacuum cleaner can be driven or perform an operation by itself in a fully automatic mode, can be driven or perform an operation by using a device such as a remote controller in a remote control mode, or can perform a cleaning operation or be controlled in a manual control mode.
Especially, a recent vacuum cleaner adopts a special sensor to recognize an ambience to add a function of a free movement and an obstacle avoiding, thereby providing a convenient working environment to users.
In addition, by adding a voice recognition function in controlling of the vacuum cleaner, the cleaning operation can be performed more conveniently, and at the same time, a user can be free in using hands or for a level of vision.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a voice control apparatus of a vacuum cleaner in accordance with a conventional art.
As shown in FIG. 1, the vacuum cleaner receives a voice command through a device such as a microphone and provides it to an input signal detector 11. The input signal detector 11 compares the inputted voice command with a preset voice command, and outputs a driving control signal corresponding to the voice command of a user to a driving controller 13.
In response to the driving control signal, the driving controller 13 outputs a motor drive control signal to a motor driving unit 15 to control an operation of the vacuum cleaner.
However, the voice controlling of the vacuum cleaner in accordance with the conventional vacuum cleaner has the following problems.
That is, in the voice controlling of the conventional vacuum cleaner, a voice command is hardly recognized due to the strong noise generated from the vacuum cleaner itself.
That is, the vacuum cleaner performs an operation through suction of air of water and due to a variety of noises generated from the vacuum cleaner itself, several phonemes instructed by the user are much damaged, causing a great problem in recognizing a voice command. In addition, the strong noise makes it hard to recognize the voice command according to a distance between the user and a receiving unit for receiving the voice command of the user or positions of the user and the vacuum cleaner.
Moreover, in order to implement a voice recognition algorithm to discriminate and process various noises and voices in an environment of the strong noise, a large amount of data needs to be processed. This result in a necessity of a high performance microcomputer for processing the data, and thus, increase in an expense.